


Dipping Toward the Light

by gwyneth rhys (gwyneth)



Category: Sunshine (2007)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Completing Their Mission, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Spaceships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:14:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28138275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwyneth/pseuds/gwyneth%20rhys
Summary: Capa seemed to be pressing his hand to the center of his chest as he moved around the med unit. Sympathy pains? Overcome with emotions?Maybe he cares about you,Mace’s addled brain supplied. Maybe hewantedCapa to care about him.
Relationships: Robert Capa/Mace
Comments: 14
Kudos: 33
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Dipping Toward the Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PR Zed (przed)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/przed/gifts).



“Do it, Capa. Do it.” Mace wasn’t sure if Capa could hear him at this point. He had to say it, though, focus him on completing the mission. Send that payload somehow. Didn’t matter if the ship was destroyed. Everything depended upon it. Everything. 

His words and his thoughts only came in short, sharp bursts, just like his breaths. His last breath. He crawled another few millimeters away from the tank—still too far away from the door. Icarus was rebooting, and Mace was dying. Capa had to do it. “Capa.” 

He never thought Capa’s name would be among his last words. Funny, that.

Another breath dragged across the broken glass of his lungs, and then the lights went out. The ship went completely dark, just like the sun would without that bomb.

///

Bright light shone beyond his eyelids. It shouldn’t be there. He was warm—he shouldn’t be. Was this death? Mace was the last person anyone would expect could earn a spot in heaven, but he’d take it if this was the offer—warmth, light, peace. Not like he’d ever had much of those in life. Mace forced himself to open his eyes, but wherever he was, it was so bright it hurt and he couldn’t see much of anything, anyway; he brought a hand up to shield his eyes. Tried to, anyway, but found he had to fight against something. 

“Wha—” he tried to say, his mouth stuck together so that only a grunt slipped past his lips. A shadow moved and then a face came into view, blocking the over-bright light: Capa. Fucking hell, Capa was the face he saw in the afterlife? _No heaven for you, Mace, you dumbass._

“Sorry,” Capa’s spectral visage mumbled, “the blanket’s pulled tight.” He leaned over Mace and futzed with something. “There.”

“There what?” Mace managed to get his mouth to say, thickly, stupidly. “Where…?”

“You’re on Icarus,” Capa responded, his brows going up.

“We’re all dead?”

Off to Capa’s left someone gave a small laugh; warm, though, not unkind. It sounded like Cassie. _Please say you delivered the payload. Please. Don’t have fucked this up again._ “You’re not dead, Mace,” Cassie said, soft and tender. “Not anymore, at least—you were in cardiac arrest due to extreme hypothermia.” She smoothed her hand over his head. So he was…dead, had been dead, anyway. “Your heart failed, but because you fixed the mainframe, Icarus was able to tell us how to bring you back. We can still finish the mission.”

That was impossible. His body had been breaking down, he’d been in paralyzing, searing pain from the cold, and his brain couldn’t have survived that kind of slow, torturous death. Maybe this was some sort of death dream and that’s just what he wanted to hear. This was some kind of fantasy. “… happened?” He finally managed to lift his hand up to touch his face; every part of him was sluggish and heavy. But every part of him was here, despite the minutes he’d spent in the coolant tanks, the damage from the exposure in space. How had he not lost parts of himself? “Corie?” he asked, because if they were here but she wasn’t…that meant… 

“She’s right here,” Capa said, pressing his fingertips lightly to Mace’s cheek so he would turn his head to the right. Corazon was lying on a bed next to him. They were both in the medical unit, then. The light was so harsh. “She’s sleeping. Pinbacker tried to kill her, too, but he didn’t succeed. She’ll be okay.” He took his hand away, and Mace was surprised to find himself wishing he wouldn’t. The need to be touched by someone, even Capa, was a little startling. Pleasant, though. He desperately wanted to know more about the situation, but he couldn’t muster the strength, struggling to keep his eyes open in the cold bright white.

“You should rest, too,” Cassie added. 

“Sure.” He was tired, and his chest hurt like a sonofabitch. It didn’t really matter if he didn’t wake up from this very nice dream again.

///

But he did wake, and this time Mace knew exactly where he was and what had happened. Breathing still felt like raking his lungs across millions of glass slivers. Even a light cough from the effort left his chest aching like someone had driven a piledriver into it for a good couple of hours. The noise made Capa start up from his chair, where it had been pulled right next to Mace’s bed. Had Capa just been sitting there for— “How long was I out?” Mace asked, his voice hoarse.

“It’s been about a day since you first came to.” 

“How long before that?”

The sad look on Capa’s face set alarms ringing in Mace’s head. “A few days.” Maybe he didn’t want to know if that meant they’d been trying to revive him for days, flogging his corpse, or they’d done it immediately and he’d just been blissfully unconscious on this bed.

When Mace turned to his right, that bed was empty—no Corazon, and no Cassie, either. He wanted to sit up, but he also wanted to stay here, just burritoed under these blankets. Safe under—somehow—Capa’s eye. It was a wonder he had any appendages left at all, let alone his damn life, but here he miraculously was, with Capa of all people nursing him. Mace didn’t know quite what to make of that. He wouldn’t mind Capa touching him again.

Capa seemed to be pressing his hand to the center of his chest as he moved around the med unit. Sympathy pains? Overcome with emotions? _Maybe he cares about you,_ Mace’s addled brain supplied. Maybe he _wanted_ Capa to care about him.

“Corie?” Please don’t say she died while I was out, Mace thought to himself. It was bad enough they’d lost everyone else, but of all the people on this ship he couldn’t bear the thought of losing, Corazon was at the top of his list. There hadn’t been enough time to get maudlin about Kaneda, the person he’d respected most, or Searle or Harvey or Trey, but if he lost Corie now…

“She’s taking a little walk, doesn’t want to lose any function in some of the muscles where Pinbacker sliced her open.” Capa absently moved the fingers on his chest, clutching, before shaking himself out of it and bringing the blood pressure tape over. He took the blood ox meter off Mace’s finger and then wound the tape around his arm, paired the reading to Mace’s comm unit that was resting on the pillow next to his ear. Apparently, Capa had this medicine thing down. When he was done, he looked at the stats on Mace’s comm, like the numbers meant as much to him as they would have to Searle. It almost made Mace laugh and tell him “Just because you use ‘doctor’ in front of your name doesn’t mean you’re actually a doctor.” Cassie was the backup medic, anyway—they were all cross-trained, sure, but with Searle and Kaneda gone, she was the one with the most field medical knowledge.

“Now that we’ve played doctor,” Mace said instead, earning an eye-roll from Capa, “are you going to tell me what happened? How did I get here—and how did you? The last I heard from you, you were stuck in the airlock.” The last thing he’d heard was Capa whispering his name. For some reason, remembering that made his throat tight.

Capa wasn’t done playing doctor because he pulled a thermometer from the top drawer and pointed it at Mace’s head. “You were unconscious before your heart stopped—which was a good thing—but your core temperature was so low by then that it reduced your body’s need for oxygen. When we found you we started CPR immediately—Cassie did, I mean, and then we brought you here to warm you up. I guess there’s a rule when dealing with freezing: no one is really dead until they’re warm and dead.”

Made sense, he guessed. You wouldn’t want to declare someone dead before you’d tried a jump-start. But there was a strange quality in the way he said it, a little shake in his voice. As though Mace’s condition mattered to him. Capa seemed satisfied with Mace’s temperature and he put the thermometer away as soon as Icarus recorded the numbers. 

“I feel like I shouldn’t be here,” Mace said, almost to himself, because he was still having a hard time wrapping his head around the news. What was he seeking by saying it aloud—validation from Capa about whether he belonged here? Death must have profoundly altered his thinking if he wanted that from Capa, but maybe he did.

“Well, I guess…there’s been a lot of research into surviving extreme hypothermia. Originally in Norway, as you can imagine, but now with the Solar Winter and all…” He waved an expressive hand. “Your first advantage was that you’d crawled out of the coolant tank: people die from brain damage due to oxygen deficiency, drowning, mostly, when they get into cold water. So you were breathing. Second advantage was us finding you so fast, and treating you quickly; it sounds like it’s all about speed with regard to warming up, and keeping up CPR during the process. That’s what Icarus told us, anyway.” He seemed sheepish, and Mace thought, not for the first time, how boyishly sweet he could be, how different he was to most of the men in the Icarus program, and to Mace himself.

Mace began the laborious process of sitting, and Capa stepped over to guide him up on the table. He pulled his chair over and sat across from Mace, flicking the little flashlight into his eyes. “Your pupils are responding much faster.” He input that into the unit. 

Scratching his eyebrow to distract himself from the startling blue of Capa’s eyes—so very close, closer than Capa’d ever been when they weren’t trying to beat the snot out of each other—Mace said, “My chest feels like a rhinoceros has been tap-dancing all over it, and my mouth tastes like a cat’s ass.”

Capa shook his head quickly, tossing the light back on the counter. “Vivid. I’ve somehow managed to reach this age without being familiar with the taste of cat ass.”

Mace tried to stop himself but couldn’t before he laughed, and Jesus that hurt. “Oh, ow. Don’t do that.” Capa put his hand on Mace’s knee, and that did something else to his chest that he didn’t really want to think about too much. It was harder still not to stare at the movement of Capa’s throat, the pulse in the side of his wrist.

“So, I’m curious, since I’ve never known anyone who technically died before. Did you see some kind of light—isn’t that what they always say? Or sense there was some kind of afterlife?”

He wondered if it was the physicist in Capa that was asking, or if it was for more metaphysical, personal reasons. “Nope. Just…darkness, when I finally went out. The only light I saw was when I woke up and saw you.”

“So you thought you were in hell.”

Clutching his chest, he huffed out another laugh. “What’d I say about making me laugh.”

Turning back to him, Capa slid an arm under Mace’s and helped him off the table. “You’re sure you’re up for it?” He needed to stand, needed to feel his feet under him again. But no, he wasn’t sure he was up for it. _Fuck. I was dead._ It was one thing to willingly sacrifice yourself for a mission, but another thing to wake up knowing you’d done so.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” he asked, rubbing at his eyes because he didn’t want Capa to see how wet they were. Christ, he was not going to let this make him fall apart, not now. They were too short-staffed for him to fall apart like a child.

There was that sheepish look again. “According to the data, some people suffer complete organ failure further into their treatment.” At Mace’s alarmed face, he quickly added, “But you’re past that threshold now, I think. The literature also said that people who are released from the hospital alive generally have a good prognosis and regain their original heart function. You _seem_ to be in the latter category.” He’d been healthy and strong until the mission had turned into such a clusterfuck.

“Here’s hoping,” Mace said, standing—somewhat wobbly—but he let go of Capa’s hand so he could hike the blanket around Mace’s shoulders. It felt like they’d put three layers of socks on his feet, nice and cushy and toasty, and he lifted his feet up and down to test out how steadily he could stand. He’d been wearing sandals when he went in the water; he was shocked his feet were there at all. Capa winced hard as he moved his arms back to his sides, and it was then Mace realized Capa’s smile was actually more of a grimace. “I haven’t even…shit, I haven’t even asked how you are. You still haven’t told me what happened.”

Pressing his hand to his middle again, Capa leaned against the counter, opening a drink carton with electrolytes and putting it in Mace’s hand, sort of like how you’d do with a preschooler, wrapping his fingers around it. “You need a lot more of this, and we should get some food in you, too.” He looked up under his brows, adding with a sigh, “Pinbacker’s calling card was a scalpel. Trey—he didn’t kill himself, we don’t think.” Jesus, Mace thought. There’d been one scalpel missing in Searle’s kit when he’d opened it, and he hadn’t even given that a second thought, just assumed it was the one found next to Trey. That motherfucker.

“He used it to hurt Corie, too.” So each one of the others could have died too, in ways that wouldn’t have been so conducive to reviving as his death was. He supposed he’d got off easy. “And me.” Capa lifted his T-shirt up, exposing a long diagonal wound across his chest and upper belly, covered with second skin bandaging. It appeared incredibly painful.

“Fuck,” Mace whispered, his hand moving toward Capa’s chest before hesitating, drawing it back, embarrassed. “That was in the airlock? You never said anything.”

“Well, you were kinda dying,” Capa said with a shaky laugh. “He must have found me first, when I went into the observation room. Icarus told me there was an unidentified fifth person onboard and where he was. I just ran after he slashed me, I wasn’t thinking. Went straight for the airlock when I couldn’t rouse anyone else.”

So all of them except Cassie were the walking wounded, and somehow Capa, severely injured, had willingly endangered his own health to save Mace’s life. As if on cue, Corazon walked into the med unit, helped by Cassie—she was favoring her right side, where Pinbacker must have got her.

Mace shuffled over toward her, met with a sparkly-headed vertigo as he moved; Capa caught him, pressed against his side, his fingers circling Mace’s wrist. “Whoa, steady. Maybe you should call this good for your first adventure off the bed.” He wanted to argue, but couldn’t. He’d very recently been dead—it wasn’t the time for macho shit. Letting Capa and Cassie baby him for a while wasn’t the worst fate.

The two basket cases were guided back to their beds. Then he noticed the cots shoved against the Earth Room wall. There had only been two exam tables/beds in the unit, one of which had previously been stored flat to save space. But there were now two beds and two cots. “Are you bunking in here to keep an eye on us?” He wouldn’t want them to give up their own space to play nursemaid.

Corie made a tiny laugh, like that was all she could afford without pain: she had always had a nice loud laugh, the kind someone who loved life had. “Your observation skills are stunning.”

After she tucked Corie in, Cassie turned to him. “We had Icarus shut down oxygen to some parts of the ship to try to preserve what we have. It’s not the best solution, but till you’re up on your feet and can come up with some plans, it’s better if we’re all in here together.”

“Makes sense,” Mace agreed. He wanted to ask where they stood overall oxygen-wise, but wasn’t sure he wanted to know, necessarily. They were doomed, regardless; he just hoped their doom came _after_ they delivered the payload. Getting to that point would be fucking hard enough.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Corie said quietly as she reached across the space and motioned for his hand; he slipped his fingers around hers. “We have enough to reach the delivery point, and some weeks back, if we’re conservative and careful. But there’s something you should know.” That sounded ominous.

Cassie interjected, “Corazon found something, right before Pinbacker found her.” Somehow she was smiling when she said that. “A seedling.”

“Something survived the fire,” Corie said, squeezing his fingers. “Or maybe more accurate to say it’s recovering from the fire.” 

Corazon and Kaneda had always been the ones he’d gravitated to because they were both so grounded, with sly senses of humor. Strong and pragmatic. Mace liked Cassie too, everyone did, but he’d never connected with the others in the same way he had Corie and Kaneda. Harvey had been too twitchy; Mace had been disappointed when he’d been assigned to the crew. Searle had been all right but Mace could never figure him out; Trey’d been more like a kid at school in some ways. And Capa—well, he was icy and mysterious, in the way that brilliant young genius types often were. Now it was just them, though, and Mace figured he had some readjustments and reevaluations to make in light of recent events.

“Seems there’s some resurrections going around.”

“And there are more seedlings. We don’t know what they are yet, but we were checking on them.” Cassie was beaming now. “Maybe it won’t be enough to help…but. Things are growing again, Mace.”

“When I’m on my feet again, I’ll plot out what each sector was planted with,” Corie added.

His heart was beating all erratic now, and he wondered if the excitement of that was going to send him into cardiac arrest again. Maybe his body couldn’t handle being happy after all these fucking miserable events. It wasn’t much hope, true, but it was some. They could deliver the payload. They could save Earth. He looked over at Capa; why, he couldn’t say, but Mace wanted to see his face, and he was smiling kindly, as though he’d saved this for him as a gift.

“That’s incredible,” he said. God, he had to wipe at his eyes again. Shit.

“Without you, we’d never have done it,” Capa offered, patting the side of his leg under the blanket. 

“We wouldn’t be here talking about it,” Cassie added. “But you two should rest now. We can discuss everything else in a while.”

///

“What am I looking at?” Capa asked, peering into the primary coolant tank’s dark depths. 

“It’s hiding under that one section, there.” Mace pointed with the hex wrench, which promptly slipped out of his hands. “Fuck,” he spat. This was so demoralizing: he’d turned into a chronic fumble-fingers because he still wasn’t a hundred percent, and being in the mainframe room was doing something to his head. While he didn’t remember a lot of what had happened here, he remembered enough, and the sense memories added an entire extra-shaky layer to his already unstable core. He’d been forced to ask Capa to be his hands to fix the damage in the wake of Pinbacker’s sabotage. 

Mace trained the light down under the lip of the tank and Capa let loose an “oof” sound as he began sliding around toward the panel. Even with plenty of layers on, it was arctic in here. Heart-stoppingly cold, Mace thought, laughing bitterly under his breath. Capa held his hand out for the wrench and Mace tried to cover that he was shaking by slapping the wrench hard against Capa’s palm. 

On the outside, he’d been getting steadier on his feet, and while it looked like he’d be in that select group of revived hypothermia victims to make a full recovery, Mace was still…reduced, somehow. Corie was healing faster, to his eyes, but she kept pointing out that she hadn’t actually died. 

When Cassie and Capa eventually stopped staring at them 24/7, checking their vitals and not getting enough of their own sleep, Corie recounted what had happened to her: Pinbacker had slipped into the oxygen garden while she was excitedly trying to find the rest of them to tell them the news about the seedling she’d found. She’d sensed motion behind her—that strong proprioception of a highly skilled martial artist, Mace had thought, recalling how easily she’d kicked his ass at the training center. As Pinbacker’s scalpel had arced toward her, she’d caught sight of him in the corner of her eye and parried with her right arm before she’d dropped down to kick behind her, knocking his legs out from under him—but not before he’d sliced her pretty bad. She’d managed to land a number of punches on him, knocking him unconscious, and escaping to stagger out of the garden, where she’d encountered Cassie. 

Despite the damage Corie had done to him, he’d still been alive, she told him. It had been Cassie who’d finished Pinbacker off, which broke something in Mace: the one person who hadn’t given her approbation for killing Trey, the one person who’d given Searle some final kindness when they’d left him to die on Icarus I. “We love you,” she’d told Searle, and Mace tried to grasp the concept of that person delivering a death blow, even to a psycho like Pinbacker. 

Now that he and Corie were approaching normal, Cassie spent more of her time in command, sitting in the pilot’s seat, coming to terms with what she’d done. It was close quarters in the med unit, so he couldn’t blame her, and he knew what it was like to want to lick your wounds in silence. For her sake, Mace wanted to get them in their bunks, give Cassie her own comforting space back. 

With Capa’s—and Icarus’s—help, he made the adjustments to the mainframe and the oxygen controls, and when he finished, they sat there for a few minutes on the cold floor, Mace flexing his fingers, trying to muster the energy to get up. Capa never acted as though he wanted to push Mace to do more, there was no friction about anything, which was an interesting development in their relationship; he let Mace test out his capabilities and supported, but never advised or argued. Maybe that was because he was nursing his own scars, mental and physical—medical had been much better set up for wounds like his than Mace’s full-body death, but he was obviously carrying trauma of his own. Mace wasn’t enough of a dick to deny that, no matter what he and Capa had been to each other before. 

The next step on his to-do list was sealing up the cabins of the deceased crew, but despite the cold, Mace wasn’t ready to move on to that just yet.

Capa seemed to know Mace was thinking too much, and he reached over and took his left hand, rubbing it to get the circulation going while Mace sat there for a beat, awkward and uncertain. Even in the low light of the mainframe room Capa’s eyes were so brilliantly blue it unsettled him; he’d never seen iris color like the almost turquoise blue of Capa’s. His mind capered around like a lunatic inside his skull, thinking about those eyes and wishing Capa would stop looking at him that way, stop touching him, yet chanting an unhinged prayer he never would. He searched desperately for something to say. “Uh…how many more days till payload delivery?” Like he didn’t know that, like he hadn’t asked that already a few dozen times since he woke up.

With a funny look, Capa said, “Three more till we’re in range.”

“You’ll need—” Mace cleared his throat and tried again. “I’ll have to reinstate the oxygen when you go to the control room. The gravity’s kind of fucked up in there, so it’ll take a while to get up to safe levels. If you’re planning on more testing, anyway, I mean; for the actual launch, just give me the heads up twelve hours ahead of time.” They’d lost more oxygen than they could afford with all the airlock use and thanks to that crazy fucker Pinbacker, but they’d reluctantly had to use the airlock one more time recently to send Trey’s body into space, their version of a burial at sea. That one hadn’t been in the mission manual. 

Corie’d insisted on saying a few words, an approximation of a real funeral, but they’d given no similar consideration when they also sent off Pinbacker’s corpse. Mace had almost suggested composting the bastard for the oxygen garden to at least make up for some of his destruction, but he bit back on his anger because Cassie had never been able to handle it when he talked like that before and she especially couldn’t handle it now. 

“Will do,” Capa responded. He let Mace withdraw his hand slowly. Almost nonchalant, as though they touched each other in kindness all the time. As though Mace hadn’t behaved like he wanted to kill him half the journey, and all the way back in training. Capa took a deep breath. “I want to run one more test before we hit the delivery point, but I shouldn’t need more.”

Mace began the laborious process of getting up off his ass. He would have to figure something out about his fitness; his body felt alien to him now, weak and stuttering and hollow. “So is all this effort gonna be moot? Are we just gonna blow up when you push the button on that thing, anyway, do you think, what with all the damage to the ship?” _And to the crew, let’s be honest._

“I sure hope not,” Capa said in the most dadlike voice, and Mace almost laughed. He should have thrown a “sport” on the end there for maximum effect. “I’d like to think that maybe there was some reason we were spared. I’d like to think that I get to see if all my theories were correct and if Earth will still go on, whether we make it all the way back or not.” Neither of them acknowledged that they were the four who’d been discussing killing their own crewmember to salvage the mission only a short time ago. It was all fucked up and weird and maybe it’d be better if they didn’t survive. The journey home would get ugly once past Venus unless Corie could truly rescue some of that garden; even with such good fortune, things would be rough. And then if they made it back, there would be inquests and hearings and an endless news cycle wanting to probe what the hell had happened. All the finger-pointing about who’d selected a loon like Pinbacker to lead Icarus I. 

As he clambered off the floor, Mace ended up bobbling the toolkit and swore as it hit the floor with a clatter. “Jesus Christ, I can’t even hold on to a rolled-up set of tools.”

“It’s no big deal,” Capa said, squatting down with a wince to pick it up, gingerly standing and leaning on Mace for a second. The oxygen was lowest in this room, and when you threw in their pathetic physical state and the extreme cold, it made them quite a pair, Mace thought. They were young, he told himself, they’d be fine soon. They had to be fine. He didn’t want them dependent on each other to get shit done.

“If something happens and I have to back Cassie up in the pilot’s seat, we’re fucked. I’m a disaster.” Icarus did most of the heavy lifting, but there was always a human element necessary.

“No, you’re not.” Capa gave him that sweet, almost secretive smile. “You’re much too hard on yourself.”

“We should get out of this cold,” Mace said, forcing himself to look away from those eyes and get back on track.

“Do you want to go lie down for a while? You really shouldn’t push yourself.” Like he needed reminding that he’d been dead. That he was…infirm, or something.

Mace shook his head. “I feel like that’s all I do now. What I want is to be useful instead of just taking up the extra oxygen. I should seal off those cabins first and then I’ll look at taking a rest.” Corie, having bounced back quickly, was already off toiling by herself in the garden room, logging how many more seedlings and roots had survived; it wasn’t a goddamn competition for who could recover from attempted murder fastest, Mace kept telling himself, but he still felt like he was letting the side down by lagging so far behind. His pride in his physical strength had taken a beating. After all that had happened and in the place they were now, Mace should be at the end of pride, yet somehow he was stuck on this.

“Okay.” Capa started down the corridor with Mace, as if he hadn’t heard him say “I should” rather than “we should.” As bomb guy he had his own shit to do—he didn’t owe Mace anything, especially not playing support animal to his fragile ass. He shook his head.

At their quarters, Mace dug around in his gear bag till he found the tape, and he showed Capa how to heat-set it once they had the individual bunk compartments completely closed off. Corie and Cassie had already moved everyone’s stuff so the four remaining crew’s bunks were clustered together and it was easier to cut the oxygen to the others, as well as to Harvey’s communications room and the observation room. They wouldn't need comms for a good long while, if they even survived that long, but the observation room was painful to close off. It had served as a relaxation or meditation space for millions of kilometers, and it was the last place the whole crew had been together when they’d watched the Transit of Mercury. If they wanted it for the payload separation, he supposed they could temporarily route air back into it for the view, just for a treat. Something that would make Capa smile.

It was all a balancing act now. Carefully not tipping the scales too far in one direction or another. Them and the ship, him and Capa. 

It was always hot on the ship but even more so now with reduced air and so many of the systems shut off. They couldn’t afford to cook, instead using up the last of the frozen food stores or the godawful MREs heated in the microwave units, whatever they could do to draw less air. No more creatively prepared meals to take the edge off the sameness of the journey. And the boxes full of the personal effects from Harvey, Searle, Kaneda, and Trey’s spaces were sitting in the corner of the mess area, adding to the overall depressing ambiance.

His system was all out of whack, now, and Mace found he was sweating like a cold drink on a hot day here, so Capa helped Mace out of his extra gear, eased him down to the floor. His heart was racing from exertion; he’d been in better shape than any other candidate in training and certainly on this ship, but the universe was humbling him, Mace supposed, by making him this weak. 

Capa scurried over to the mess and then tossed him a drink with electrolytes, which Mace was getting pretty sick of—but he didn’t want to appear churlish about being looked after, so he’d chosen the route of being offensively grateful instead, and thanked Capa profusely. He wiped sweat off his forehead and added, focused on putting his tools back in the bag, “Hey, listen. I never—I don’t think I ever said thank you. Which is shitty of me. I owe you twice now.” As he leaned back, Capa slid down the wall next to him.

Knocking his elbow against Mace’s, Capa said, “No, you don’t. What was I going to do—let you die? Mace.” He gestured: _come on_. Mace remembered the sound of Capa’s voice, fearful and tender, saying his name while he was dying. He wanted to go on hearing Capa say his name, he realized with a shocking clarity. You could do worse than have Capa be concerned for you.

“I should never have said some of the things I said. And you didn’t deserve what I did to you. About the message packets or about Trey…that was wrong of me. I’m sorry.” 

“I’m serious—you definitely don’t owe me any apologies. For fuck’s sake, Mace, you were right—it _was_ my decision. I made the recommendation to Kaneda, everything happened because of my anxieties about my own goddamn project.” Capa’s cheeks grew red, the way they always did when he was emotional, and Mace could tell he wanted to be told he was irredeemable, to have the one person who detested him most insist it was all his fault.

Mace sucked in a sharp breath, made a noise in his throat. “So is this gonna be a competition?”

“For who feels worse? If it is, I’ll win.” Capa gave him that stunned blank stare that was all too familiar by this point.

But Mace couldn’t stop himself from smiling. It felt…weirdly good to get it out in the open. A relief, like some part of him that had been withering and slowly dying off was also coming back to life. Eventually, Capa must have felt something similar because he dipped his head, his face evidence that he was actually enjoying this conversation. Did they have to go back to work? Mace wouldn’t have minded it if they could have just stayed there for the rest of the daylight cycle.

He was kind of annoyed with himself, now, for wasting all this time dismissing or downright detesting Capa when they could have had moments like this. When he could have been making Capa smile instead of glare. He wanted to reach out and brush his thumb over the little crinkles around Capa’s eyes, trace the edge of his mouth. They had…something, here, and Mace thought _I can just let all that go. Dive in._ And maybe death had made him lose his mind, but for some reason, Mace was moved to lean over and kiss Capa full on the mouth. Like you did to your sworn enemy. Just guys being dudes.

Capa didn’t move a muscle or try to jerk away, but he also didn’t exactly return it, so Mace pulled back, not wanting to see the startled distress on Capa’s face but unable to look away. 

Holding his hands up, Mace said, “I don’t—I have no idea why I did that.”

There didn’t seem to be anything Capa could say, he only stared mutely at Mace. 

“What can I say? I’m out of my mind, I guess, after everything. Let’s just…pretend this didn’t happen.” 

Capa slow-blinked those blue eyes at him, like some beautiful, confused owl. If this had been normal times, Capa would be reacting very differently, and man, would it be a relief to get a good punch in the nose right now instead of whatever this was.

 _You fucking dick,_ Mace told himself. _You went and fucked everything up._

///

There was a disappointingly finite number of Earth Room modules programed into Icarus, Mace had discovered. He’d thought it would be a nearly unlimited selection thanks to constant updates during the months spent in range of Earth’s communication systems, but apparently not. So far, he’d made a pretty good dent in them, but if he kept coming in here, he’d be cycling through repeats. Of all the places left to hide that hadn’t been shut off for oxygen rationing, the med unit and the Earth Room were the most useful. So what if he was hiding? Mace had good fucking reasons.

He had a million things to do now that he was steadier on his feet and his energy was improving, and most required doing right damn now. The scrubbers needed tending to, the oxygen generators really should have a good going-over to see what else he could eke out of them, he’d have to scrounge materials to rebuild the pumps. So much had gotten so messed up on the ship in the past few weeks—especially in the mainframe and coolant tanks—that Mace would much rather not use the solid fuel oxygen generator unless there was no other choice. That meant he and Corie had to determine the amount of safe water they could reclaim from the fire suppression when the garden had caught fire in order for him to be able to squeeze some more oxygen out via electrolysis. She’d taken him in for a look-see, trying not to overhype her optimism, but he was duly impressed; it did appear that there would be some growing plants by the time they revisited the point where the mission had gone off the rails. Not enough to save them, but maybe…

“Mace, this module has reached the end. Shall I replay it, or would you like to choose another?” Icarus asked.

“No, Icarus, go ahead and play the Na Pali Coast kayak one.”

“Yes, Mace.” At least Icarus didn’t have any expectations of him, it just did what he asked and didn’t try to psychoanalyze him like everyone else on the ship was doing. Yes, he’d been technically dead, yes, they’d lost half their crew, and yes, they probably weren’t making it back alive. But not every single minutia of his current existence had to be scrutinized for signs of trauma. Mace wanted to believe that his eyes leaking half the damn time was a reaction to almost dying and PTSD, but he was never the type to lie, especially to himself. Sometimes a guy just wanted to run through escapist fantasies of an Earth he’d never known to avoid thinking of the crewmate he’d tried to make out with. Right?

He’d tried to tell Corie that very thing when she’d been testing him out in the garden, poking at his recent behavior. She had fixed him with one of those Looks with a capital L she gave him from time to time, saying, “You go into the Earth Room and sit there on the floor every day, almost in the spot we found Trey. We don’t need Searle to tell us something is up.” He’d almost snarked at her that it had been nice of them to clean up the blood for him, but found he didn’t have the meanness left to take his frustration out on her. She was worried: three of them had dealt with something deeply distressing, it was true, but only one of them was incapable of processing his emotions about it. Though unlike Mace, they weren’t falling in unrequited love, either.

Cassie mostly kept to herself, up in command, because that was her way of dealing with it: silence, everywhere but in her own mind. There seemed to be less concern about how she handled her trauma than with how Mace dealt with his. Probably because she didn’t lash out at everyone all the damn time. He’d gone in once to sit in the other pilot’s chair next to her, they’d had a nearly monosyllabic conversation about how all right they believed they were, and then he’d taken her hand and held it for about an hour before leaving her alone. 

There was work to be done. Everyone else seemed capable of getting on with it, just not him. Because…he’d kissed Capa. And he’d wanted to keep kissing him, and kiss him each time he saw his stupid face, to say nothing of some of the other things Mace was dreaming about doing with him. And that was so many shades of fucked up and dumb.

Capa had said nothing to him about it afterward. They’d studiously avoided each other as much as possible. At meals, Capa would look at him with those big blue baby deer eyes and it felt uncomfortably like he was studying Mace, trying to dissect why Mace would do such a bullshit thing, but at least he kept up the pretense it hadn’t happened, and for that Mace should probably be grateful, though he didn’t feel much gratitude at the time.

So fucked up. Because if they really did manage to squeak their way out of this, if by some hugely improbable miracle they made it within sight of Earth, that was one long fucking time to carry a torch for the guy you’d been frenemies with during most of the journey. Mace should have appreciated that frostiness more while he’d had it.

No wonder he’d gone after Capa so hard all the time—sublimation, Searle’s books would no doubt say. Mace had just been…what? Trying to get Capa to notice and like him, he guessed, like kids on a playground. It couldn’t be more humiliating. 

The crew had split into two slightly overlapping shifts: Mace and Corazon on one together, Capa and Cassie on the other, which was sort of laughable because it wasn’t as if they really needed one pilot per shift. But that morning when he’d been writing up the log for the next shift, Capa had snuck up behind him and asked Mace to increase the oxygen in the payload control room. A million thoughts had spun around in Mace’s head of the things he wanted to say, but all he could focus on was the weird tingling on the back of his neck that had been set off by the vibrations from Capa’s low voice, and he’d immediately developed a brain fog, instantly forgetting all his words. 

They were nearing the launch point. If the payload blew them up along with the reignited sun, it’d be a better ending for Mace. 

He watched the last bit of the trip module play across the Earth Room screen walls, aquamarine waves lapping at the black volcanic rock, a healthy sun burning down on everything, psyching himself up to go check on Capa’s progress with the payload. Only a few more hours now—Mace had to man up and help. He unwrapped the blanket from his shoulders and saw a shadow on the right wall, then a little tap tap sounded on the thin plastic panel. Capa opened the door and stepped in, crouching down by Mace.

“I know, right, yeah,” Mace said, holding his hand up, hoping to forestall any disappointed reminders from Capa because damn if he didn’t hate to disappoint the guy. “What do you need help with?”

Capa appeared bemused, but soft, concerned. “Look, I know you’re trying to avoid me, but—”

“I’m not trying to avoid you.” _Pants on fire, man._

“We both know that’s bullshit.” He sighed and knelt on the floor. “You never even gave me a chance. You just instantly regretted it and then told me it didn’t happen. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to make you”—he gave an embarrassed little laugh—“ _regret_ regretting what happened. I know you don’t want to talk about it, but for the record, _I didn’t say that._ You did.”

What the fuck was he playing at? Mace turned his eyes up to the top of the Earth Room walls. The green cliffs and the wet sand and the blue sky of Kauai surrounded them. Ugh, fuck, now he had to talk about this. It could be their final hours and he shouldn’t go out with something festering in his guts this way.

“I didn’t say that I wanted to pretend it didn’t happen,” Capa reiterated with more urgency, because Mace was acting like he’d suddenly gone deaf in both ears. He was frozen, trying to process what Capa said.

“I don’t know why I did it,” Mace said, trying not to sound as stupid as he felt. Or like a petulant kid who’d thrown a rock through a window.

“Yes you do.”

His mouth twisted, he wanted to throw the blanket over his head and never come out of the Earth Room again, forever and ever amen.

“Has your confidence and arrogance always made you blind to seeing people who are attracted to you?” Capa asked, a wry smile tilting his lips. 

“That’s more a function of my stupidity.”

But it made Mace return his smile, and Capa seemed to take that as an invitation, putting his hand to the side of Mace’s face and pulling him closer. He almost tilted off-balance, so Mace put his hands on Capa’s shoulders and then they were kissing again—and it wasn’t just Mace laying one on him without provocation. There was lots of provocation now. He was a _nice_ kisser, Mace thought, his hands going up into Capa’s shaggy hair, and god he felt good, and tasted good, and made low animal sounds in his throat that went straight to Mace’s dick. 

When they pulled apart, Capa looked smug but he pressed his forehead against Mace’s with tenderness. “I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression or make you miserable. I just thought you’d always…you know.”

“What, you can’t tell when someone’s punching you out that what they really want is to kiss you?”

“To be fair, I don’t think you realized you were doing that, either.”

He answered that with another kiss, slipping his hand up under Capa’s T-shirt, right on the scar. It had knitted together fast, but Mace could feel the ropy line of the healing skin, and he knew it still hurt Capa. Under Mace’s hand, Capa’s heart beat fast, and it was fascinating to him, to feel such a thing this way—someone else’s heart beating for him, and remembering his own had stopped completely not long ago.

“I can’t believe with that kind of wound you managed to save my life. Almost bleeding to death yourself.” What would have happened if Cassie hadn’t gotten him out of the airlock? 

“Well, not that you want to hear this, but it’s probably a good thing you weren’t conscious, because it was like some kind of slapstick comedy. Only one able-bodied person who wasn’t strong enough to lift you on her own. You might have been horrified by us manhandling you if you’d had any awareness at all.” 

“Manhandling. I might not have minded as much as you think.” He traced the line of the scar with his fingertip; Mace wanted to see it but he didn’t want to press Capa. “After all I ever did was treat you like dirt.”

His face was serious, earnest; he didn’t agree with Mace, it was clear. “I wasn’t willing to let you go.” Capa pressed his own hand on Mace’s heart. “And don’t try to pick a fight with me about that, because I’m glad I didn’t.”

Before he could overthink it, they were hiking up each other’s shirts, undoing each other’s pants, and when Capa slipped his warm hand over Mace’s erection he thought he might explode out of his skin. He hadn’t been touched by another human being this way since their training isolation, months before they’d gone up to the station for the even lengthier launch quarantine. And being on the ship with its lack of space and privacy meant he hadn’t even felt comfortable jerking off, so he was like a wind-up toy that had been primed for way too long. 

It must have been the same for Capa because he was looking intently at Mace, the color in his cheeks high and his eyes pale and brilliant, like the stars outside the ship. In the first months of the program, Mace had had plenty of sexual partners, but he realized now he’d never seen Capa with anyone and Mace knew he wasn’t like Kaneda or Corazon or Harvey, who’d left spouses behind at home when they went down to Mexico. He supposed someone could come into the med unit and catch the two of them rolling around on the floor, giving each other hand jobs in the Earth Room, but Mace didn’t give a crap now—he only wanted to revel in the feel of Capa’s body against his, the sensations his hands created on Mace’s skin, the sounds that escaped his mouth and sent little shocks up Mace’s spine. 

The room felt as hot as that beach in the simulation module must have been when it was filmed, and he breathed in shallow, panting breaths. He realized after a few moments that it wasn’t just their arousal making him lightheaded and breathless but also the low oxygen, and he thought of Corie saying “Air’s low. We have to limit our exertions” when he and Capa had been trying to beat the crap out of each other. He smiled against Capa’s throat.

They both came too fast, like a couple of teenagers, he thought, but they were each laughing at the insanity of it, not embarrassed at all. Mace nuzzled into Capa’s shoulder, enjoying the smell of him, the awareness that had returned of how fast Capa’s heart was beating—and that it was because of him. “Shit,” Capa said with a shy laugh, “I really hope we don’t blow up in a couple hours, because…”

“Yeah.” They had a lot of wasted time to make up for. “Let’s do that again. Or maybe unlock the next level.” Mace pulled Capa’s T-shirt down, helped him with his pants. They’d have to clean up before someone caught them out. With the beach simulation playing, he felt like they were in that old, old movie where the couple were rolling around on the beach; at least there was no real sand to get everywhere. Maybe there’d be beaches to roll around on when they got home… _if_. “Hey,” Mace said, soft and low, “I’m really sorry, for everything. I am.”

Capa made a face with the most incredible mixture of affection and “you’re a moron” in it Mace had ever seen. Not too many days ago, he’d have wanted to beat that look off his face. “Let’s make a pact: from here on out, no more apologies. If everything goes well, we’ll have a couple more years here to work on our shit.”

Sounded like a pretty good plan. They knew who the brains of this outfit was.

///

For the payload separation, Mace had opened up the observation room again—they wouldn’t need oxygen in the payload control room anymore, once the device had been sent off to do its thing, so it seemed a worthy expenditure and he wanted Capa to enjoy the event instead of watching on some tiny little pad screen as Icarus guided it out. 

When Mace joined the gals there to wait for things to start, the smile was back on Cassie’s face, and Corie was almost bouncing on her toes—here was everything they’d endured for, at long last. The moment they’d survived this fucking roller coaster of death for.

They didn’t need Icarus to tell them the precise moment of separation: you could feel the whole ship shudder when the bomb was launched and Icarus reversed her course to begin speeding back the way they’d come—the three of them flinched, remembering the last time the ship had juddered and groaned that way. Mace put his arm around Cassie, squeezing her tight, and a few minutes later Capa was there, coming to stand at Mace’s left. “Bombs away,” he said lightly, though Mace could see how monumental this was to him, how lit up he was.

The initial moments were almost anticlimactic, just waiting for anything to happen. At first, the payload was merely a glittering disco ball, zooming away from them as it sparkled with energy, the window’s filter making it difficult to spot the craft against the roiling sea of fire it was heading toward. Even in its death throes, the sun was spectacular and blinding. Then something happened—Capa had explained each of the stages in training, but Mace had kind of tuned him out—and multiple small white flashes flared against the orange and red, culminating in one huge burst. “Wait for it,” was all Capa said, and he quietly reached out beside Mace and took his hand, lacing his fingers through Mace’s. 

Mace only squeezed Capa’s hand in acknowledgement, yet somehow Corie knew to turn her head and look down as though she’d been alerted that something unusual—more than what they were witnessing through the window—was going on. He gave a slight lift of his eyebrow, and smirking, Corie stepped back to slide her arm around Capa’s waist. “Good job on not blowing us up. If there’s still time for that to happen, don’t tell me,” she said. “I want my last moments to be happy.”

Icarus informed them, “Dr. Capa, the first of the explosions has registered successfully. It will be visible in a few seconds.”

“Thank you, Icarus,” Capa said, and Mace glanced at him out of the corner of his eye: he was so handsome like that, his head raised and his eyes fixed on the screen, watching his life’s work with so much pride that it made Mace’s weak heart hurt. Eventually, there came an enormous flash of light, eyeball-searing even with the filters set at their highest, and then multiple sparkling glimmers followed in its wake, a cascade of little baby bangs reigniting the sun. Resurrecting their world, if they were lucky. The four of them stood together silently in witness.

“It’s working,” Mace whispered, and though they wouldn’t know for certain just how successful it was, Icarus was continually adjusting the filters, the light was incrementally growing brighter. The light was hope, whether they lived to see it on Earth or not.

“Thank god,” Cassie said when the cascading flashes stopped, her voice rough, and then she looked up at Mace. “The champagne?” There’d been three bottles of champagne stored away by the crew who’d stocked the supplies—good luck charms, they believed, because they’d all wanted to assume the mission would succeed and there would be reason to celebrate. The nervous way Cassie said it sounded like she wasn’t sure they deserved a celebration, though, possibly because of all they’d lost—and who.

“Yes, the champagne,” Capa agreed. “Let’s put a few thousand kilometers behind us first.” They watched for a bit longer, and Capa and Icarus communicated about their findings on his pad, recording for posterity what Mace hoped he’d get to tell everyone about in person. He deserved that, and more.

After a while, Mace said, “I should go check on the systems, make sure everything on the ship’s functioning normally after the separation. There’s a lot ahead of us.” He’d have his hands full of work, for however long they had left. “But, yeah, we should celebrate.” There were many months still before they’d be in range to find out if Earth was warming up, assuming they survived that long. Before, he hadn’t cared if they did, he’d accepted his impending death twice now, only to find himself getting another chance. Mace wanted to do everything in his power to let Capa and Cassie and Corazon find out if they’d succeeded. He wanted to see this through with Capa. 

The crew broke apart quietly, all of them knowing the work was never-ending, yet no one knowing what to really expect now that they were on the other side of this thing. Their lives had been consumed for years and years with arriving at just this moment; what lay ahead of it was as much a mystery as its success or failure had been just moments ago. At the door to the observation room, Capa pulled Mace back and put his hand on the side of his face, looking into his eyes with curiosity. “This isn’t just me, you know that, right?” he said, those unearthly blue eyes fixed on his. “We’re here because you fixed the mainframe, you made it possible for Icarus to survive. Because of what you sacrificed, we’re here.”

It was a ridiculously romantic thing to say, but Mace would take it. They had a couple years to wildly compliment each other, embarrass each other with overblown sentiments. He let Capa kiss him, pressed against the wall, the bright sunshine on the screen limning Capa’s hair and shoulders. It might just be a desperate and lonely shipboard fling that wouldn’t survive their homecoming, if they had one, but they could cross that bridge when they came to it. In the meantime, Mace was going to kiss Capa past the planets, past the stars, for as long as he had the chance.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from a quote by Mary Oliver: "And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself.... I too dip myself toward the immeasurable."
> 
> [On tumblr](https://teatotally.tumblr.com/post/639170704780214272/new-yuletide-2020-fics) if you'd care to reblog!


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